Many networks currently employ caching servers to decrease the amount of traffic to and from a media source located outside of the network. For instance, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) may utilize a caching server that stores web pages that are frequently accessed by the users on the network. Therefore, the ISP can decrease the amount of traffic from the ISP's network to the web server that is somewhere on the Internet.
Streaming media is becoming very popular, even for live events. Streaming media, though, is very demanding of bandwidth, especially for audio/video streams. One popular streaming client is QUICKTIME™, which can facilitate viewing of both pre-recorded and live events by using Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP). Such streaming, though, cannot be cached using current caching techniques. Specifically, different clients have different session IDs, and each session has a different session ID. The session ID is embedded in every packet from the server to a given client, and a general web caching server cannot cache the content because another client requesting the same stream will have a different session ID. From the web caching server's point of view, the two clients are requesting different things. Thus, the content is dynamic, even though multiple clients may consume the same content. Currently, there is no technique that allows for caching a media stream using conventional web caching techniques.